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Praxis Series

Romantic Circles
Praxis (ISSN: 1528-8129) is a series of peer-reviewed critical volumes devoted to the field of Romanticism and its theoretical underpinnings. Closer in form to a scholarly book of essays than a critical journal, each volume in Romantic Circles Praxis Series (RCPS) explores a particular subject, figure, or theoretical approach, such as the gothic, contemporary culture, discourses of empire, and many others.

Section Editor:

This collection thinks the “rights” of the negative against the more common association of the term “rights” with human rights and rights that can be posited. Such rights, despite their seeming liberalism, produce a normative notion of the person which is in the end biopolitical, and moreover, in assuming that rights can always be posited, they assume the primacy of the public sphere. The essays in this collection all resist the current emphasis on the public sphere that has resulted from the absorption of “Romanticism” into the “Nineteenth Century,” and focus instead on Romanticism as a retreat from publication, publicity and consensus. Whether this retreat is absolute negation or a withdrawal that holds something in reserve is a question left open in the spaces between these six essays on Godwin, Charlotte Smith, Coleridge and Goya.

Is Romantic prose a neutral instrument of representation? Does it struggle to engage questions of experience and sensation in new ways? How should prose be understood in relation to poetic expressiveness? The essays in this volume explore Romantic prose across multiple genres as a kind of performative utterance that redraws the boundaries between the private and the social.

“What’s new with German Romanticism?” – the question gestures to the important contribution of German-language writing to our understanding of the period but also to the trenchant and suggestive interrogation of the category of “newness” by German Romantic writers. The essays in this collection represent some of the most important current trends in scholarship, but each also grapples in some way or another with the challenges that the literary, philosophical, scientific, and legal writings of Romanticism pose to received narratives about history, meaning, and power, including narratives about originality and newness, revolutionary breaks and fresh beginnings.

This volume brings together essays from Japan, China, Taiwan, and Korea to offer an unprecedented view of English Romanticism’s presence in the modern literature and literary criticism of East Asia. Going beyond simply tracing the influence of English Romantic writing on East Asian writers and critics, each essay reveals an intrinsic and often surprising interconnectedness in the Romantic aesthetics and mode of thought across the borders of East and West. This collection’s reflection on English Romanticism through the historical particularities of East Asian nations at the onset of modernity sheds light on Romanticism as a still valid form of cultural critique against the shared yet divergent forms, experiences, and questions of modernity.

This volume explores the multiplicity of the media concept during the Romantic age in England. The collection's central investigations include: the multiplicity of Romantic-era media technologies and theories; the conceptual models of network, assemblage, and ecology used by contemporary scholars to map the relations between media; Romantic valorizations of noise as a benign register of materiality, singularity, and finitude; and the turn to questions of affect and emotion as a way to describe the position of the subject within extended networks of mediation. Volume contributors reflect on the interactions among the diverse media forms of the Romantic age and explore the connections between those old media forms and today’s dynamic new media ecologies.

What might romantic minimality and brevity suggest as alternative additions to our critical vocabulary in romantic studies? How do they allow us to think differently—and
briefly—about a constellation of questions and perspectives that throw into relief the necessity to think through the small, negligent, obscure, too little or too much, the ephemeral, the
mere there is, the all but not there? The authors of the position papers collected for this issue were each asked to respond to just these kinds of prompts, and to
keep their arguments operatively brief. Conciseness and intensification in service of our theme of brevity and minimality was the order of the day. The space between stanzas, like the
disappearance of a ruin into history, became equal considerations for reflecting on the brevity of things that the larger “life” of romanticism cannot ever ignore.

The essays in this volume probe the way that Romantic writers explored the limits and possibilities of thinking in terms of systems. The purpose of the collection is not to provide a single perspective adopted by Romantic authors, any more than it is to provide a single theoretical perspective with which to view those authors. Instead, the essays collectively convey a sense that Romantic writers viewed systems with a distinctive mixture of skepticism, anxiety, and enthusiasm.

This volume of five essays focus on how the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley uses and modifies Gothic conventions across his whole writing career so as, on the one hand, to extend the limits of the Gothic, shading it into a wider Romanticism, and, on the other, to press the limits of the Gothic down to their most basic foundations, releasing new potentials. These essays all argue in different way that, by the end of his career, Shelley has proposed an answer to the question: what does Gothic writing most basically assume in its mixtures of previous genres, and how do these assumptions both establish its limits and set the stage for transgressing them?

This volume takes as its starting point a 2001 volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry, 1819-1820, in which volume-editor Michael Scrivener, employing Theodor Adorno's terminology, interrogates a potential binary in our understanding of Shelley's "interventionist" work: the "antinomy of commitment and autonomy." Asking what it means for a work of art to intervene in its immediate political context, the present volume asserts the necessity of seeing through and beyond the antinomy of political commitment and artistic autonomy by rereading and reimagining the political in Shelley’s writings and his legacy. Indeed, the essays in this volume chart new political possibilities in our estimation of Shelley’s body of work—pathways that take us back to post-Peterloo repression through to the Victorian Shelleyans, and then forward to Jacques Rancière’s post-Marxism.

The six essays collected here suggest that Romanticism exposes us to a materialism that cannot merely be overcome and an idealism with which it is not identical. By reading beyond the texts conventionally associated with Romanticism, and by recasting the critical tendencies–from thing theory to object oriented ontology–through the poets, genres, and critics of Romanticism, these essays position Romanticism (and show how Romanticism may always have been positioned) in another relation to things as they are–or may be.

This volume is dedicated to both excavating the Romantic genealogies of visuality and charting directions for the ways in which the study of Romantic visual culture may redraw the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary bounds of Romanticism, bringing diverse, and in some instances new, objects and their ethical, political, and aesthetic stakes into view. The essays investigate three broad inquiries: 1) technologies of vision and objectivity’s slippages; 2) the indigenous or transplanted fruits of visuality’s New World Genealogies and 3) the role of proto-photography, panopticism, and slavery in the spectral formation of Romantic visuality. Emphasizing the ways we interpret visuality in romantic culture, the volume invites reconsideration of media, practices, and discourses that would seem to belong to earlier and later periods—from the artifacts and modes of viewing attached to curiosity and to technologies and ways of imaging and imagining that have become aligned with photography and the digital. The volume includes an editor's introduction by
Theresa M. Kelley and Jill H. Casid, with essays by Sophie Thomas, Marcus Wood, Matthew Francis Rarey, Kay Dian Kriz, and Lucy Kamiko Hawkinson Traverse.

This issue takes its inspiration from the writings on translation, tragedy and twentieth-century literary theory in the work of the late Romanticist and comparatist Tom McCall, who died suddenly in January 2011. Three noted Romanticists and literary theorists, taking off from specific critical essays by McCall, explore the centrality of Greek tragedy as it emerges in Romantic writing (especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin), for philosophy, literature, and literary theory. Passing between the Greek and the German (notably in Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles), and between the literary and the philosophical, these papers offer new and original insights into the complex ways in which Romantic writing was bound to the translation and interpretation of Greek writing and the unique manner in which twentienth-century literary theory emerged from the Romantic reflection on the relation between language and the emergence (and suspension) of thought. Edited and introduced by Cathy Caruth, with essays by Cathy Caruth, Ian Balfour, David S. Ferris, and three contributions from Tom McCall (1 |2 |3).

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell arrives at the striking conclusion that “romanticism opens with the discovery of the problem of other minds, or with the discovery that the other is a problem, an opening of philosophy.” Cavell’s account of how Romanticism opens is not historical in orientation, but rather offers a rich conceptual, aesthetic, and ethical site of concern that both interrupts and generates his life’s work—thus presenting an opening for scholars and students of the Romantic period to think the subject of Romanticism anew in studying (with) Cavell. The present collection—with essays (in suggested reading order) by Emily Sun, Paul Fry, Eric Lindstrom, Eric Walker, and Anne-Lise François, and a substantial Afterword by Joshua Wilner—hinges between the efforts to record Cavell’s engagement with British Romantic texts and to stage new interventions.

Featuring essays by leading art historians, literary scholars, and historians of antiquarianism, this volume sheds new light on Romanticism's material and visual cultures. Romantic Antiquarianism reveals the important role that antiquarian discourses and practices played in shaping neoclassicism, the sublime, and other major concepts of the Romantic period. Edited and introduced by Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake, with essays by Martin Myrone, Jonathan Sachs, Thora Brylowe, Rosemary Hill, Timothy Campbell, Ina Ferris, & Sam Smiles, and a response by Jonah Siegel.

In the interview that comprises this volume, Anne Mellor recounts her determined commitment to rethinking Romanticism through the lens of gender. On the eve of retirement, Mellor continues to query our assumptions and preoccupations as Romanticists, even as she looks back on her long career. The audio clips attached to the transcription resonate with Mellor’s intellectual curiosity, as her voice continues to prompt the reader to return to the texts, the archives, and the critical concerns of Feminist Romanticism. Roxanne Eberle introduces the volume and conducts the interview.

The six essays in this volume offer a range of mediations prompted by the volume’s title. This volume explores older and newer logics of “matching” and “counting” and “measuring” (whether statistical, geometric, or otherwise un/calculable); they register as well an upsurge in interest in formal-language, neurocognitive and medial-historical approaches. These essays invite us to think “bodies,” “multitudes,” and “subjectivity” along different axes. They ask us to think about the (romantic) one, the (romantic) proper name, quantity, and quality; they invite us to reflect on the status of poetry and measure, about the work of the novel as totalization, about models of mind, about calculuses of populations and food. Ranging through Wordsworth, Scott, Malthus, Babbage, and Galt (among others), this volume points to new directions in romanticist thinking while reconstructing the complexity of romantic-period thought.
Edited and introduced by Maureen N. McLane, with essays by
Matthew F. Wickman,
Marjorie Levinson,
James Brooke-Smith,
John Savarese,
Bo Earle, and
Ron Broglio, along with two responses by Maureen N. McLane:
Response #1, Response #2.

This collection of articles is intended to initiate a conversation about and between biopolitics and romanticism. Its broad contention is that the study of biopolitics reanimates the question of romanticism in two senses. First, the set of conceptual resources provided in recent work on biopolitics opens up inventive lines of inquiry that enable scholars to re-think the already established awareness that the literature, philosophy, and culture of romanticism displays an obsession with life. In another sense biopolitics reanimates romanticism insofar as the current scholarly concern with life as an object of power marks the radical survival of romanticism. If romanticism responds well when examined in the light of contemporary biopolitical theory, then a constitutive part of this response is a certain resistance to biopolitical theory.
The contributors to this volume demonstrate that the biopolitical intervention on life engages paradoxes, predicaments, and aporias that have been widely or fully appreciated neither by theorists of biopolitics nor by critics who take up their work. Romanticism, we suggest, is a privileged locus for the awareness that even the most assured representation of life turns upon an irreducible “literariness.”
Edited and introduced by Alastair Hunt and Matthias Rudolf, with essays by
Marc Redfield,
Emily Sun, and
Sara Guyer, along with a response by Eva Geulen.

The aim of this volume is to explore the Romantic credit crisis of 1797-1821. The decision to end cash payments and flood the economy with low denominational banknotes led to a spectacular increase in executions for banknote forgery. Many Romantic writers saw this bloody debacle as a sensational illustration of the dangers of an economic system based on mere "paper" value. While some critical attention has been given to the cultural history of credit (Brantlinger, Poovey), the issue of forgery has been overlooked. Yet, as the essays in this volume show, the impact of the credit crisis and its thousands of victims affected literature, journalism and art in often profound ways. Ian Haywood edits and contributes to the volume, along with
Robert Miles,
Alex Benchimol,
Alex J. Dick, and
Nick Groom.

Robert Bloomfield's letters document one artist’s struggles (and sometimes his victories) to share his unique voice and vision; the online publication of his extant letters (a companion to this collection of essays) reveals new and exciting insights into Bloomfield the artist and the man. The essays included in this collection highlight and draw attention to aspects of Bloomfield's literary production that would likely not be possible without the full access to his letters that the edition provides, and make a strong case for why Bloomfield continues to be worthy of study. They suggest how much more remains to be said about this prolific poet. This volume is
edited and introduced by John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, with essays by
Tim Fulford,
Peter Denney,
Ian Haywood, and
Bridget Keegan.

Romanticism and Disaster considers and responds to the timely
concept of devastated life by thinking about how the capacity to read,
interpret, and absorb disaster necessitates significant changes in
theory, ethics, and common life. What if the consequences or
"experience" of a disaster were less about psychic survival than an
unblinking desire to face down the disaster as a challenge to
normative structures? The essays in this volume attend to the
rhetorical, epistemological, political, and social effects of romantic
critique, and reflect on how processes of destruction and
reconstitution, ruination and survival, are part and parcel of
romanticism's grappling with a negativity that haunts its corners. Put
in this way, "disaster" does not signal a referential event, but
rather an undoing of certain apparently prior categories of dwelling,
and forces us to contemplate living otherwise. In confronting the end
of things, what are the conditions or possibilities of existence
amidst catastrophe? What is a crisis, and what kinds of challenges
does it occasion? What can be philosophically gained or lost by
analyzing disaster in its multiple sites, contexts, and instances? This volume is
edited and introduced by Jacques Khalip and David Collings, with essays by
Scott J. Juengel,
William Keach,
Timothy Morton, and
Rei Terada.

This Romantic Circles Praxis Volume moves the perspective of critical inquiry into British Romanticism from the Island (England) to the Islands (West Indies), considering the particular significance of the Atlantic—watery vortex of myriad economic and cultural exchanges, roaring multiplicity of agencies, and vast whirlpool of creative powers. Black Romanticism remembers a forgotten ancestry of British culture, recovering the vital agencies of diasporic Africans and creole cultures of the West Indies. It does so by practicing counter-literacy, reading the works of nation, empire, and colony against themselves to liberate the common cultures they occlude. The five essays presented here examine texts by or about Jean Jacque Dessalines, Juan Manzano, Jack Mansong, Mary Prince, and John Gabriel Stedman, following a circuitous route that begins in Africa and travels from Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, Suriname, Bermuda, and Antigua to corresponding points in England, America, and the continent. The circulation of radically different adaptations of the “same” material provides new ways to understand the colonial Caribbean. This volume is
edited and introduced by Paul Youngquist and Frances Botkin, with essays by
Lindsay J. Twa,
Lissette Lopez Szwydky,
Joselyn Almeida,
Dustin Kennedy, and
Michele Speitz.

Capitalizing on the conjunction of renewed scholarly interest in Thelwall and new archival finds, this collection of essays addresses the central question of the coherence and continuity of Thelwall's diverse pursuits—literary, political, scientific, therapeutic, elocutionary, and journalistic—across the four decades of his career (c. 1790-1830), and provides new insight into Thelwall's eclipse and persistence in the nineteenth century.
The volume includes an introduction by Yasmin Solomonescu and essays by Nicholas Roe, Mary Fairclough, Molly Desjardins, Emily Stanback, Steve Poole, Angela Esterhammer, and Patty O'Boyle.

The essays in Romantic Frictions find in Romanticism what philosophical modernity has often found there: a disposition to recognize oppositions that cannot be squared or resolved precisely because they constitute the ongoing work of culture and writing. Such frictions are embedded in a shifting temporal moment whose inner complexity is similarly textured such that neither history nor philosophy assumes a master (and fictional) disguise. Both are instead crosscut and assembled in ways that sustain an inner friction that invites being read. Rather than reify the critical tendency, stubbornly at issue since the 1980s, to suppose that Romanticism belongs either to deconstructive philosophy or to new historicism, the essays in this volume understand romanticism as a cultural and literary terrain where these and other disciplinary affiliations exist together, not as easy companions but as productive antagonists.
This volume is edited and introduced by Theresa M. Kelley, with essays by Ian Duncan, Mary A. Favret, Daniel O'Quinn, Matthew Rowlinson, Colin Jager, and Jacques Khalip.

Romantic-era fans collected autographs, souvenirs, portraits and relics of celebrity writers, artists, performers and athletes; pored over gossip-filled periodicals and newspaper notices; imitated celebrities' fashion statements; fantasized about becoming friends or lovers with celebrities; got caught up in "crazes" for persons and texts; created fan fiction, wrote fan mail and formed communities of like-minded devotees. Analyzing fan practices across a range of cultural contexts, the essays in this volume will explore how the concept of "fandom" can help us make sense of the role of various audiences in the cultural activity and cultural productions of the Romantic period.
The volume includes an introduction by Eric Eisner and essays by Nicola J. Watson, Clara Tuite, Mark Schoenfield, and David A. Brewer.

This volume looks at the
profound challenges William Blake poses to both
editors and readers. Despite the promises of the
current multi-modal environment, the effort to
represent Blake's works as he intended them to be
read is increasingly being recognized as an editorial
fantasy. All editorial work necessitates mediation
and misrepresentation. Yet editorial work also
illuminates much in Blake's corpus, and more
remains to be done. The essays in this volume grapple
with past, present, and future attempts at editing
Blake's idiosyncratic verbal and visual work for
a wide variety of audiences who will read Blake using
numerous forms of media. This volume is edited by
Wayne C. Ripley and Justin
Van Kleeck. It includes an editor's
introduction by Wayne
C. Ripley, with essays by David Fuller,
W.
H. Stevenson, Mary Lynn
Johnson, Rachel Lee
and J. Alexandra McGhee, Justin Van
Kleeck, and Wayne C.
Ripley.